Placenta cake

Placenta cake is a dessert from ancient Greece and Rome made of many layers of dough, mixed with cheese and honey, flavored with bay leaves, baked and then covered in honey.. It is mentioned in the Greek poems of Archestratos and Antiphanes, as well as in the De Agri Cultura of Cato the Elder.

Name
The Latin word placenta comes from the Greek word plakous used for thin or layered breads. The word plakous comes from the Greek word plakoeis () meaning "flat".: placenta..: πλακοῦς.

History
The placenta cake first appears as plakous () in the ancient Greek poems of Archestratos who describes it as a dessert served with nuts and dried fruits. Antiphanes in 4th century BC describes plakous as a dessert made with wheat flour and goat's cheese.

In 160 BC, Cato the Elder wrote a recipe for placenta in his De Agri Cultura following the Greek recipe for plakous. Cato possibly copied the recipe from a Greek cookbook.

The Byzantine descendants of plakous are the plakountas tetyromenous ("cheesy placenta") and the koptoplakous (Byzantine Greek: κοπτοπλακοῦς) both of which are the ancestors of modern foods like tiropita, börek, banitsa, and baklava.; . The name placenta () is used today on the Greek island of Lesbos to describe a dessert made with thin layers of pastry and crushed nuts that is baked and then covered in honey. The Greek dessert was adopted into Armenian food as plagindi, plagunda, and pghagund all meaning "cakes of bread and honey.".

Related pages
Greek food

References
Citations

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Category:Greek food